States that Experience the Most Power Outages
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I recently stumbled upon a CNET article that shows which states experienced the most power outages from 2018 to 2022. I found some of the data, which was compiled by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), to be a bit surprising. What follows is a quick summary of the data for your reading pleasure!
Which States Get the Most Power Outages?
First and foremost, as you likely know, extreme weather events are on the rise, which means that outages are as well. For example, just within the last couple of months, Hurricane Helene killed power for over 4.5 million people, and Hurricane Milton left millions more in Florida in the dark.
Therefore, as you may have guessed, states located in the southern part of the U.S. are most vulnerable, but only 6 of the top 10 are southern states.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Maine is the state that experiences the highest number of outages per year (2.9 per year). The remaining states encompassing the top 10 are Alaska (2.6), West Virginia (2.6), Louisianna (2.6), Tennessee (2.3), Mississippi (2.2), Vermont (2.2), Texas (2.0), Arkansas (1.9) and New Hampshire (1.7).
For comparison purposes, the states with the fewest number of outages per year are Washington, DC (0.5), and Illinois, New York, Nevada and Nebraska which all come in at 0.9.
In terms of outage durations, not much of a pattern emerges. In this category, Louisiana takes the #1 spot with an average outage duration of 31.8 hours. The other “top duration” states include Maine (15.3 hours), West Virginia (14.1 hours), Mississippi (12.95 hours), Oklahoma (12.9 hours), Connecticut (12.8 hours), North Carolina (10.43 hours), Vermont (9.6 hours), Michigan (9.3 hours), and Alabama (8.9 hours).
The states with the lowest average outage durations are Washington, DC (1.05 hours), Arizona (1.73 hours), Nevada (1.95 hours), Delaware (2.18 hours), Colorado (2.5 hours), Minnesota (2.67 hours), Illinois (2.69 hours), and New Mexico (2.87 hours). Overall, the average outage in the U.S. lasts approximately 2 hours.
So, there you have it! If you are operating in one of the states ranked as having the most power outages, make sure your emergency preparedness processes and protocols are 100% buttoned up!
